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Strauss was born in 1970 in Philadelphia.[13] Her father died when she was 5. She was the first member of her immediate family to graduate from high school. For her 30th birthday she was given a camera and started photographing in the city's marginal neighborhoods.[14] She is a photo-based installation artist who uses Philadelphia as a primary setting and subject for her work. Strauss typically photographs overlooked (or purposefully avoided) details with a humanist perspective and eye for composure.[15]

In 1995, Strauss started the Philadelphia Public Art Project, a one-woman organization whose mission is to give the citizens of Philadelphia access to art in their everyday lives.[16] Strauss calls the Project an "epic narrative" of her own neighborhood.[16] "When I started shooting, it was as if somewhere hidden in my head I had been waiting for this," she has said.[16]

Between 2000 and 2011, Strauss's photographic work culminated in a yearly "Under I-95" show which took place beneath the Interstate in South Philadelphia.[13] She displayed her photographs on concrete pillars under the highway and sold them for $5 each.[1]

She frequently photographs near her grandparents' former home at 16th and Susquehanna.[17] Her photographs include shuttered buildings, empty parking lots and vacant meeting halls in South Philadelphia. Strauss says her work is “a narrative about the beauty and difficulty of everyday life."[18]

The exhibit Zoe Strauss: 10 Years was organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it appeared from January 14, 2012, to April 22, 2012. The show was a mid-career retrospective, building upon Strauss' ten years of photographic works, shown yearly from 2001 to 2010 in a public space beneath an I-95 highway overpass. During that time she mounted her color photographs on the bridge supports and offered photocopies for sale for five dollars each. The 2012 exhibition was the first critical assessment of Strauss' ten-year project.[7][19] It was accompanied by a 250-illustration catalogue, Zoe Strauss: 10 Years (2012).[3] The exhibition was also shown at the International Center of Photography, New York City, from October 4, 2013, to January 19, 2014.[20][21]

In 2012, the Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition Zoe Strauss: Ten Years included the installation throughout Philadelphia of 54 billboards featuring photographs by Zoe Strauss. Although they could be viewed individually, the images were loosely structured around the themes of the Odyssey, journey and homecoming.[22] In this, the Billboard Project was similar to Strauss' annual I-95 exhibition in South Philadelphia which she describes as an “epic narrative about the beauty and struggle of everyday life”.[23] The Billboard Project included photographs from Strauss’s travels around the country. from the Gulf of Mexico to Fairbanks, AK.[22][23]